Monday, 29 August 2016

EU Ref: What was it good for?

This piece was originally published by the online magazine New Compass

As most of
the world knows, the UK had a referendum on EU membership in June. What the
rest of the world probably doesn’t know is how divisive the referendum and its
aftermath were. It exposed deep divisions around class and race, revealed that
half the country knows nothing about the life experiences of the other half,
and holds them in contempt anyway and that a sizeable section of the population
would like to repeat the exercise until they get the outcome they want. And
towards the end of the campaign, an MP was assassinated by a Fascist.

But despite fomenting such profound fissures in British society, the referendum
result (Leave won by 52% to 48%) has resolved nothing. Prominent Leave
campaigners seem disappointed they won, the Conservative government is nowhere
near triggering Article 50 (which begins the two-year process of Brexit) and
calls for a second referendum regularly emanate from businessmen
and
politicians while others hold that Parliament
should simply refuse to implement the result. The referendum has, at best,
instituted a shaky truce which won’t last long.

The EU referendum was, in short, a terrible way to arrive at an important
decision. It failed miserably to apply three vital principles of effective
decision-making. The people making the decision did not have adequate
information, were denied the chance for deliberation and critical reflection
and lacked the power to implement the decision they arrived at.

The
referendum was presented as the epitome of democracy. What could be more
democratic than asking the people what they think, after all? But other forms
of democracy exist that grant sovereignty to ordinary people while avoiding the
ephemeral thrill of choosing which section of the elite you like the best.
Experiments, such as citizen juries, participatory budgeting, random selection and assembly democracy devolve genuine power and result in more trusted and
better judgements:

Deliberation and critical reflection

The EU referendum was a thoroughly mediated experience which relegated the
public to the role of passive onlooker. The jousting of the protagonists was
presented daily on TV screens and through the print and online media. For most
of the campaign, the mainstream media presented the referendum as largely an
internal Conservative party contest and revelled in farcical spectacles such as
a confrontation of ‘In’ and ‘Out’ flotillas on the River Thames.

Other forms of democracy, however, rest on enabling conversation and
deliberation to happen. Participatory Budgeting, for example, involves the
election of recallable delegates by assemblies to determine how all or most of
a municipality’s budget is spent. According to one academic, “the key
ingredient is deliberation, the quality of the exchange of ideas.” Citizen
juries spend days deliberating issues such as obesity, transport, electoral
systems or work and as a result their findings are trusted by the public.

Thinkers such as Erich Fromm have pointed to the way the jury system, a
democratic way of arriving at life-altering decisions, arrives at generally
objective and reliable decisions precisely because it involves prolonged
deliberation. The participants know their decision will have an immediate and
lasting effect and treat it seriously as a result. The EU referendum, by
contrast, resembled a two month long edition of ‘Judge Judy’.

Representation

One Leave campaigner, the writer Dreda Say Mitchell, described the political world which she
temporarily gained entry to, as “largely one big boys’ club. And it’s for a
very specific type of boy, at that.”

Referenda,
like its kin Parliamentary government, merely amplifies the representation of
people who have already carved out a media profile. The most vocal protagonists
of the EU referendum – David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael
Gove – all male and privately educated, illustrate the unrepresentativeness of
representative government. The referendum made it plain to see how the upper middle classes dominate the terms of the debate in British
politics.

By contrast, there is a growing use around the world of an ancient principle of
democratic government – that of random selection. Aristotle thought democracy
was characterised by selection by lot, so that citizens could ‘rule and be
ruled in turn’, while elections were a sure sign of oligarchy. The modern form
of selection by lot involves the creation of a mini-publics by randomly selecting
willing participants with the aim of achieving demographic balance and the
representation of all social groups. The new Icelandic Constitution of 2010 and
the electoral system in British Colombia were both partly determined by
randomly selected groups of citizens.

Aside from its inclusiveness, random selection or sortition has two other
important effects. It detaches political influence from personal ambition as
participants are not elected and only wield influence for a finite period. And
it brings together people with divergent views and backgrounds, compelling them
to take into account perspectives other than their own and those of people like
them. In these senses, random selection represents the antithesis of the UK’s
referendum experience.

Adequate information

The EU referendum excelled in generating a thick fog of misinformation. The
Leave side peddled the fiction that Brexit would result in £350 billion in
extra funds for the NHS every week and made immigration the centrepiece
of their campaign, masking the fact they weren’t in fact promising to reduce
immigration. And, aside
from aping Nazi propaganda, the Leave side’s posters deliberately conflated
the migrant crisis with EU membership.

The Remain side, meanwhile, predicted economic Armageddon and warned a
‘punishment budget’ comprising spending cuts and tax rises would inexorably
follow Brexit. Allegedly neutral economic experts from the Bank of England,
OECD and IMF were cited to underline the recklessness of voting Leave and its
calamitous effect on GDP. But these experts were anything but neutral. The OECD
had advised Britain to ‘press on with austerity’ on the eve of the 2015 General Election, while the
Bank of England ensured making rich people richer and inflating share prices were the crucial elements of the way the state
responded to economic collapse in 2008.

Both sides in the campaign also indulged in the daily fantasy that the UK was
still a manufacturing nation and that the result would either ruin or
invigorate the country’s trade. Politicians made endless visits, garbed in high
vis vests and hard hats, to whatever manufacturing firms they could locate. In
truth, the UK has undergone rampant deindustrialisation over the last 30 years and the country’s biggest
export is financial services.

Other forms of democratic decision-making, however, are predicated upon
understanding, not concealing, the issues at hand. A Citizen’s Jury established in Mali in January 2006 heard evidence for and against the
introduction of the GM technology before concluding that GM crops should not be
grown in the country. In the US state of Oregon a randomly
selected panel of citizens convenes to
scrutinise ‘ballot initiatives’, referendum proposals which are then put to the
state’s voters at election time. They take evidence from advocates and policy
experts before compiling a ‘Citizens’ Statement’ about the proposals,
essentially a piece of distilled information which can be used by voters to
make their choice.

Both these democratic techniques embody the proper attitude towards experts.
Experts are never neutral and should not be treated as such. There is
disagreement within every field of expertise and practitioners, whatever their
claim to superior knowledge, need to be interrogated by citizens and their
viewpoints translated into understandable language. Every branch of specialised
authority, especially finance and economics, relies on establishing an air of
mystery about its workings and judgements. The task of a genuine democracy is
to dispel this.

Taking back control

A natural and justified objection to the examples of alternative democracy
presented here is that they are mere adjuncts to the existing system and have
no real power. They can advise but little else. So I think we need to establish
ways that ‘alt democracy’ can transform society, not just make it appear more
consensual. Appropriating the language of the Leave campaign in Britain, here
are two ways we can ‘take back control’.

The first is through the public control of information. Beyond the racism and
xenophobia, the UK’s referendum result indicated there was something very wrong
with status quo despite the official narrative of growing GDP and record levels
of employment. But this was an intuitive sense of anxiety and directed at the
wrong target.

We need to shine an unflinching light on our economic system and dominant
institutions. The writer, Dan Hind, advocates a system of ‘public commissioning’ with the expressed intention of taking the power of
forming opinion and social depiction out of the hands of the mainstream media
and giving it to the public. Through an annual budget of £80m, thousands of
journalists and researchers would be employed to undertake long-term research.
The public would vote for the subjects it wanted to see investigated and each
round of voting would be preceded by open meetings. “National institutions, the
EU and institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and
the Bank of International Settlements would all become available to sustained
scrutiny,” says Hind. This approach was piloted in Croatia in 2013.

The second way is through the public establishing an influence over private
investment and government stimulus. Illustrating how little has changed over
the last eight years, the Bank of England responded to the Brexit vote by
spending £170 billion on shoring up the wealth of rich people. It revived its
Quantitative Easing (QE) programme, bought the debt of companies it liked, and
re-embarked on a £100m programme to encourage banks to lend out their money.
QE, which buys debt securities from pension funds, insurance companies and
‘high net worth’ individuals, has succeeded in pushing up the prices of assets
such as shares and property. But for those without assets it is meaningless.

A real way to ‘to take back control’ or in fact to establish it in the first
place, would be for the public to decide how economic stimulus is spent.
Through country-wide assemblies the public could determine how many new council
homes are built, develop transport projects, found co-operatives or establish
medical research laboratories.

If this democratic method of assigning state stimulus money was established, we
could become more ambitious. The American mathematician and author of After Capitalism, David Schweickart, has proposed ‘social control of
investment’: a tax on the capital assets of all enterprises to be
dispersed throughout the country on a per person basis, enabling assemblies to
decide how a proportion of investment is spent. Apart from establishing a
breach in the divine right of central and private banks and corporations to
decide where and how investment takes place, such a new democratic initiative
would impede the inexorable growth of mega-cities, such as London. Mega-cities
are ecological nightmares, sucking in people and capital, while starving other
regions of investment. If GDP is calculated per capita, London and the South
East are the only regions of the UK to have recovered at all from the crash of
2008. This is one form of inequality, highlighted by the referendum, which
needs urgent rectification.

But instead of these democratic alternatives, the UK has indulged in the
illusory freedom of plebiscite democracy, which assiduously stokes
dissatisfaction while failing to deliver anything more than the chimera of
empowerment. Real democracy looks very different.

About Me

Capitalism is not beautiful, said John Maynard Keynes. It is not intelligent, it is not virtuous and it not just. “But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”
This blog is about the ideologies that mask the ugliness and injustice beneath the surface. And how our perplexity might be diminished.
You can contact me at idealogically@gmail.com